Google gets real-time data from LSE
(Reuters) - The London Stock Exchange Group is to provide real-time market data to Google, bolstering the search-engine's Google Finance offering with free access to London prices previously only available with a delay.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has spent two years wiring real-time inputs into its products — adding streaming news to Google Finance in December 2009 and rebuilding Realtime Search in August 2010 — so the LSE deal completes the pattern for its finance property: the raw price feed itself. What changed with this agreement is that London quotes on Google Finance move from delayed to live, at no cost to the user.
The pickup was broad for an exchange-data story — Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires, paidContent and WebProNews all carried it on the day — which reflects why it matters: an exchange that historically monetized price data through licensed terminals just handed a real-time feed to one of the largest consumer audiences on the web.
First-order effects
- Retail users of Google Finance get free real-time London prices where they previously saw delayed quotes, undercutting the paid or registration-gated data services that charged for exactly that latency upgrade.
- The London Stock Exchange Group gains mass-market distribution for its prices, using Google's audience rather than terminal subscriptions as the reach channel.
Second-order effects
- Other exchanges face pressure to strike comparable free-consumer licenses with major web portals, or watch their own delayed-quote offerings look stale next to Google's live London data.
- Data vendors whose retail business rests on selling real-time access to casual investors see the low end of their pricing ladder commoditized by exchange-portal deals.
Third-order effects
- If exchanges keep licensing real-time feeds to consumer platforms at scale, latency hardens into a two-tier product: free live prices as a traffic magnet for the public, with professional-grade depth and rights still sold at a premium.
- Exchange revenue models drift from per-user data fees toward volume licensing deals with aggregators, making the big web platforms gatekeepers of retail market-data distribution.
The trend: Exchanges are repositioning real-time price data from a metered product into a mass-distribution asset licensed to consumer web platforms, with Google Finance as an early test case.